Can you make Agile successful without fighting your company's culture?

As a new addition to the Inviqa Group, I recently attended the Inviqa Bootcamp, an internal week of training in which we are taught the development techniques and processes the Inviqa technical team leaders have put in place for automating and standardising the way each project is run.

What impressed me the most during this week of training is how important employee professionalism and quality are for Inviqa. Its dedicated training team focus constantly on improving team skills and technical ability to make us better software engineers and deliver bigger and better digital projects.

Code hygiene

“Would you have any surgery carried out by a doctor who does not wash his hands?”

Everybody in the room shook their heads. Of course nobody would. There is too a high risk of complications. In software development ‘infected’ code can translate to bugs, bad user experience, poor performance and the complete failure of web applications.

When it comes to software development, both companies and engineers often disregard the practices of “hygiene” when writing code, and often blame lack of time as an excuse for doing so.

Generally, some of the most frequent causes of “dirty hands” can include tight project deadlines, pressure from project managers (who may ignore Agile methodologies and ideas), or product owners who don’t see the value in QA and test time.

Applying code hygiene to TDD

I have mainly been working on Magento for the last five years and as a Magento developer I know how hard it can be to apply Test Driven Development principles when working with a framework that was not really built with TDD in mind.

This does not mean it is impossible. The fact that all developers at Inviqa must write tests before any code implies it is not an impossible task, and the Group’s success rate with enterprise clients is an indication TDD and BDD is the way to go.

To every company in search of quality software development it is vital to test first to avoid having a huge bill at the end of the project to fix bugs that should have not been there in the first place.

I take the opportunity to thank the Inviqa Group and in particular Marcello Duarte, Alistair Stead, Marco De Bartoli and Jakub Zalas (aka Kuba) for delivering such a great training week.

Putting quality at the core of our business enables Inviqa to deliver technical excellence. Inviqa is a trusted technical partner for some of the world’s most successful brands.

To clean up your code or bring your developers on board with TDD, get in touch.